Posts: 6

Hi, so I was thinking about this, and the only reason I could see that at signs would be replaced with this (A-T) string is that in case someone puts their email out there in a topic publicly and spam bots could pick it up and do their spam bot thing. If that's the case, I can tell you that even in this case, if whoever created this bot took some time about it, they could counter these permutations by using regular expressions to search out anything that could be an email addressOK so, I'll use atsign to refer to shift 2 in this example because sometimes the transformation happens, other times not so its hard to repeat, but if my email is honeybunny5atsigngmail.com and we change it to honeybunny5(A-T)gmail.com something like the following would find it:

OK, so that's sloppy, and regex are not my best strength, maybe someone can come up with an example, I didn't even test that one to see if it worked or not, but the point is, its easily reversible, and a bit of a nuisance on our end to be seeing (A-T), so can we maybe get that lifted.

The thing about obfuscation like this is that the bot developers need to know what they're looking for. If everyone uses a distinct method of obfuscation, the odds of a bot developer targeting that category of obfuscations is lower. Just 2 days ago, I read an article about how embarrassingly easy it is to get around automated checks for malicious scripts, using code obfuscation techniques I came up with before I'd fully grasped the concept of classes. If stuff I thought of 13 years ago can still beat Google, trivially thwarting email harvesters is a matter of not drawing their attention, for the time being.But yeah, just writing myname at gmail isn't going to last long. Maybe we should use the bracket thing on the names of email sites.

I'm not actually sure if that one comes with the bord, but if people want me to remove it and don't think it's doing what it's supposed to do that would be fine, just let me know.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see, Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

I wouldn't say its not offering any protection, but the protection it offers, which is minimal, versus the cost of inconvenience, which isn't huge, but is a factor, Me personally, I don't think it's worth keeping around.

Then you get into the whole darwin aspect, as in, if someone is intellectually challenged enough to go posting emails on a public board, they kind of deserve to have it snatched up. Here let's make this fun, Why don't you go here and vote?

Well don't know the results of the pole (it seemed to be on facebook which I don't use), but I've removed the at sign thing. Discussion of adult games featured the word porn, and since now thanks to restricted accounts life is much more difficult for spambots, i didn't see the point of keeping it around, so did the at sign at the same time.

hopefully this won't flood everyone's inboxes with spam emails.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see, Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)